Search Results for: izzy

My chiropractor is named Dr. Nancy Burns and she is a gifted and much loved healer. Going to see her is the very antithesis of going to see a typical physician in the modern health care system. Her patients love her and hug her, she makes time for each of us and is easy to talk to and helpful. She listens. And she heals.

She could well be a role model for how modern health care ought to work, but I won’t hold my breath.

She has a dog named Casey, and I was startled to learn when I first came that he is one of the many sons of Izzy,  my first hospice dog and the dog who chased sunsets with me when I first became a photographer. Casey is a sweet soul like Izzy was he is struggling with a bad leg.

Izzy was a remarkable creature, and I meet of lot of his offspring as I move around town. He was a lover boy who often got out of his holding pen. He was a much leaner dog than Casey, but he had the same eyes.

Every time I look at Izzy, I see Ma, our wonderful old sheep who barely survived lambing, was a wonderful mother to Debbie and Jake (he did not survive youth) and then died six months later. Ma was old and tired, she came to us as a rescue sheep with a very heavy coat. She and Red tangled for awhile, then worked things out.

Ma was as sweet as she was dumb, and Izzy strikes me as the same. She is friendly, she comes running up to me when I come out, is very attacked to Rosemary and will have some beautiful wool for Maria to sell.

She is just like Ma, I wonder if she is not Ma reincarnated. Sometimes I believe in reincarnation, sometimes not. Mostly I accept that there are things I can’t explain, and Izzy’s resemblance of Ma in every way is one of them.

Rosemary is a powerful presence on the farm, even after one day. She is a leader, smart, independent and vigilant. I think she is still looking for her flock from the other farm. Two were left behind. This morning, all of the sheep were grazing, and suddenly Rosemary led Izzy out of the flock and made a break either for the barn or in search of her pals.

I yelled ahead to  Red to get up and “walk up” and he locked eyes with Rosemary and moved slowly towards her. She advanced on him with her head up, challenging him. He lowered his ears and tail and went into his now famous border collie crouch.

Rosemary paused, looked around, stomped the ground, and then turn and ran back to the other sheep. There is no way she would have gotten past Red, and if she did, it would be with a border collie hanging off of her neck. I think she remembers yesterday, when he got her into a special pen.

Breakout foiled. Fate did her usual spectacular job of running in circles around Izzy and Rosemary, neither of whom paid the slightest attention to her. She had a lot of fun, though, and it is always a joy to see her run.

Red is getting massage and laser treatments this and neck week, he’s walking stiffly after his brawling yesterday as we rounded up the sheep.

Izzy is getting over her shyness, she came out of the barn and walked right up to me and gave me a good and close stare. I happily took her photo and she looked me up and down and then went back into the barn. She walked right over Fate, unimpressed. She fits in very well here and her wool was especially beautiful.

The shearer found shards of barbed wire throughout Izzy’s wool, our friend Jay Bridge brought some to us so we could see it. Izzy, like Kelly, has become a symbol to us and others, something to feel good about as we are swimming in this sea of sadness and anger.

Small acts of good, I find, keep me afloat, keep hope alive, remind me of the glorious promise of human beings, the only species on the earth who can choose to be good, choose to be better.

Our imaginations lead us to the promise of good things, the power to do good.The fierce power of imagination is a sacred gift, joined with the complexity and grandeur of the human mind, our unique ethical depth, and our innate and natural sense of the divine. Imagination becomes a powerful tool, a magnificent instrument for hope and for seeing what is good in us.

I imagine Izzy lying for days, months, even years, on wool laced with barbed wire. I imagine someone wanting to save her, to find a good home for her rather than sending her to slaughter. I imagine someone taking her in, having him shorn, giving her the good life all living things deserve.  My heart sings seeing her lie down in comfort to chew her cud.

All of this imagining came to be. We’ll keep the barbed wire in the wool, not as a reminder of cruelty or neglect, but of goodness and redemption.